this series of videos is recorded for my HUP 101 course

a class that I teach at laguardia community college

my name is doctor richard brown and i will be the instructor of this course

uh... this series of videos is, um, uh,

primarily intended for classes

uh... my online classes at laguardia colleges as I just mentioned uh... but

i've taught this course of for many years i taught it at brooklyn college

before i came to laguardia

and so uh... these slides these powerpoint slides also accompany

the Chaffee book

uh...the philosopher's way which is the book that students

in this course will be using

and so, um

uh... these slides then

represent what I kind of drew on the board, or whatever

a complete course in philosophy

and um...

in order to do that

the first question that we've got to start with

just by way of introducing the topic uh...is well, what is philosophy?

what is it that we're going to be studying in this series of lectures?

and answering this question is very difficult because if you ask

a hundred different philosophers what it is they do you're liable to get a hundred

different answers

um so it's not a very easy question to answer. Different people think

of philosophy as different things.

now, typically

uh...

sometimes people conceive of philosophy as asking certain kinds of questions

well you know very deep questions about the meaning of life and

what's real and those kinds of things and it's true that philosophers do ask those questions

and so one way of talking about philosophy is talking about those kinds

of questions that philosophers deal with and the kinds of answers that they give

and so we'll talk about that at the very end this lecture, talk about the

various branches philosophy

uh... another way of thinking about philosophy is

looking, well, sort of

what the word means and how people have thought about it historically

and so that's what I want to turn to first uh... i want to actually spend a little bit of

time

talking about what i call the pre philosophical way of thinking

uh... or

uh... the way that people thought about reality

before philosophy

uh... was discovered

and there was some characteristic differences

in this historical way and so one thing you'll notice uh... in these lectures is

that

I'm very historically orientated

and i think that it's very important

for us to put

the questions were interested in in this kind of historical perspective so we

will be going uh... historically in order

all right so

to start with then at the beginning

let's give a very brief introduction to the origins of society and all of this

should be taken with a grain of salt, of course

because when we're looking back on history we're doing our best to

reconstruct events

uh... that

uh... only uh... fragmentary evidence of which survives so we must always remember

that we're doing the best that we can

so we'll be referring to this timeline here

over the course of the class

and so here I'll mark where we are now the present-day CE

and those of you probably know that we used to use 'BC' and 'AD'

'BC' for 'before christ' and 'AD' for 'Anno Domini'

which uh... means in latin 'the year of our lord' uh... and year one here is supposed to

mark the historical birth of uh... jesus of nazareth

not everybody is a christian and so having these christian-centric dates

uh...there is a movement away from naming them that way so we changed it to

'CE' for

'common era'

and 'BCE' for 'before the common era' and i use those prefixes here suffixes here (whatever)

but the turnaround date is still year one there where historically

many have thought

jesus was actually born. There is some debate about that, as i said earlier,

all of this is sort of piecemeal knowledge that we have

but there are...some scholars think well maybe he was born slightly earlier than year one

or slightly later than year one, by which I mean the actual historical jesus

uh...

uh... so we're not sure but that's the date that year one is set

uh... and that's why it's set at year one

now of course there are many cultures that don't

have uh...

their dating system this way so

there are cultures that don't start over when they think that jesus was born and so for

them

uh... they will number the year not 2011, like us, but five thousand something

but so roughly speaking then if this timeline were to extend

all the way to the left

a good space using this same kind of rough metric that I've had here

you'd have to go another

seven

to 10 thousand years in the past

uh... to find human beings

as we

think of ourselves now settling down

uh... so this is the invention of farming you may not think of farming

as an invention but it is an invention

there are certain technologies which are required

in order to farm; you need to be able to irrigate, you need to be able to

control water

um, by having

buckets for instance or uh...

irrigation channels, you need to be able to use a hoe

planting seeds in nice orderly rows, etc

so we have evidence and again none of this is hard and fast um

ten thousand

roughly or so

uh... years before year one

people started farming

so then for roughly seven thousand years people lived in this way

farming, settling down, domesticating animals no longer living

hunter-gatherer lifestyles

no longer being nomads

but nothing like a city developing there are still these tribal associations, it's still

very

family oriented, extended family

and etc

but around three thousand

five hundred years before year one

we find city life as we know it so what we call civilization

civilized life

developing

and cities back then of course would've been much smaller

a large city would comprise about a thousand, two thousand people

something that we don't consider to be very large but of course the population back then

would've been much smaller so there

would have been very large cities with a thousand to two thousand people

and of course

what corresponds with the origins of civilization are

the invention of writing

and human beings around this time

seemed to have developed

writing in various places

around the world so it's not just in the western world

that we find writing,

cuneiform tablets, etc, being developed uh... but also of course everyone knows about Egypt

and the hieroglyphs

and

lesser-known perhaps in the americas they were also developing forms of writing and in china and the east

as well

people are developing writing around this time and it's interesting to look back at some of

these

earliest

kinds of writings...um...they give us some kind evidence of what the people thought

at the time

and the way they viewed themselves in the in the grander scheme so I want to take a look at

that

but first i want to focus on the places that we're going to talk about so

here's some pictures this is the map of ancient Mesopotamia

uh... over on the right over there is where we're going to be focusing on

uh... babylon and sumer. Babylon is where the tigris and euphrates rivers meet

and those of you uh... who are aware of current...uh...

...um...

nations and politics

will recognize

what is babylon there as modern day Iraq. So, there's Egypt there,

the Sinai peninsula

and of course the out of africa theory

which uh...

uh...

some scientists think describes the way

uh... we

human beings evolved

has it that human beings evolved in Africa

and then

migrated nomadically up and across the the peninsula there and then settled down

uh... started farming in babylon

uh... in areas in Egypt and so on where these cities later developed, and so,

uh...

what we find from these early areas are actually pieces of writing

which are very

illustrative so i want to look at one in particular

and this is, um...

famously known as the Epic of

Gilgamesh.

Now

if you haven't read the Epic of Gilgamesh you probably should

it's a great story and it used to be read n English 101 classes, I don't

know if they still do or not, or in English 102 or something like that

uh... but it's an epic in the sense of an epic adventure

and it tells the story of a king

named Gligamesh who was a great king of one of these ancient cities

and Gilgamesh wants to know

why people die, what the meaning of life is and how we can be immortal.

So, he really wants to know the answer to this question

and he decides that the way he's going to answer it is to

go on a journey

to where the gods live

and to demand of the gods that they tell him, Gilgamesh, the answers to these questions.

and so he does.

A lot of adventures ensue.

uh... and I won't rehash all of the stuff that happens

He eventually gets to the gods and asks them this question

and they set him a bunch of tasks. They say 'Gilgamesh, if you complete these tasks

we'll answer your questions, tell you everything you want to know'.

the tasks are very much like

the kinds of things you find in greek mythology, um he has to kill a certain beast, he has to climb a certain mountain, he has to divert a certain

river

uh... and etc. So, he does all of that stuff.

and finally he comes to the last task the gods

the gods tell Gilgamesh 'you must stay awake for three days and three nights'

and if he does this

they will tell him the answer

So he says 'no problem'

but of course he doesn't have red Bull

or caffeine or any of the other luxuries, No-Doze, that modern people use to do all nighters

so he stays awake for three days

and two nights

and on the third night

he falls asleep.

So, poor Gilgamesh wakes up in the morning

to see the gods saying,

'oh well, you were so close but now you'll never know.'

they just...he does not complete the tasks and he does not get to know the answer

he becomes very angry

and then he finds out, uh, comes to a realization

that the way to be a immortal for a human

is to have your name remembered by doing great things. By building a great city, by being a fair ruler and so on

an so forth

this story, this very brief synopsis, a butchering, of a story

uh... illustrates two points that I want to make.

So, the first point is

that it's sort f wrong to think of philosophy as simply a group of questions

because notice the kind of question that Gilgamesh is asking here

are very deep questions

why do we die? What's the meaning of life? How do we

become immortal?

What's the right way to live?

It is not as though

only philosophers are interested in those questions

human beings are interested in

those kinds of questions

That seems to be

something

that afflicts us in a certain way. We want to know the answer to these questions

but of course there are different ways of answering